Review/Film: Remains of the Day; Blind Dignity: A Butler's Story

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IN the late 1930's, in a stately home of England called Darlington Hall, Stevens (Anthony Hopkins) is the butler. He's the supreme commander of a vast staff that includes the housekeeper, the underbutlers, the cooks, the maids, the footmen, the scullery helpers, even those people who work outside the great house. As the members of his staff are expected to serve him, so Stevens serves his master, Lord Darlington (James Fox). He serves without question. Or, as he says at one point, "It's not my place to have an opinion."

Stevens is not just any butler. Through a combination of hard work, long hours, denial of his own needs and carefully blinkered intelligence, Stevens has become what his peers would acknowledge to be a great butler. In his world he's the equivalent to Lord Darlington, someone who, when the chips are down, is to be trusted. Stevens is a man of honor and dignity, which become for him, as for the intensely dim-witted Lord Darlington, fatal flaws.

Taking this rather arcane story, adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro's award-winning novel, Ismail Merchant, the producer; James Ivory, the director, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the writer, have made "The Remains of the Day," a spellbinding new tragi-comedy of high and most entertaining order. Here is an exquisite work that could become a quite unlikely smash.

Nothing that Mr. Merchant, Mr. Ivory and Ms. Jhabvala have done before -- not even "The Bostonians," "A Room With a View" or "Howards End" -- has the psychological and political scope and the spare authority of this enchantingly realized film.

"The Remains of the Day," like the novel, is nothing if not metaphoric. Stevens is the proudly subservient, pre-World War II English working class. Darlington Hall is England. Stevens's fierce determination to serve, and the satisfaction it gives him, are the last, worn-out gasps of a feudal system that was supposed to have vanished centuries before.

The film also has its roots in history. The people who gather around Lord Darlington recall the members of the so-called "Cliveden set." These were the high-minded, sometimes fascist-leaning, thoroughly wrongheaded English Tories who, in the years before Munich and the partition of Czechoslovakia in 1938, worked so hard to accommodate Hitler and to preserve England's rigid social hierarchies.

In one of the film's nastiest, most vicious scenes, Lord Darlington allows two of his guests to ask Stevens about his views on German war reparations and other international matters of the day. Says the mannerly Stevens in response to each question, "I'm sorry, sir, but I'm unable to be of assistance in this matter." Lord Darlington's friends have proved their point: universal suffrage is an appalling waste of time.

Yet history and metaphors never get in the way of the film's piercing social and psychological comedy. "The Remains of the Day" is so lucid and so minutely detailed that it has its own triumphant life, which is enriched by other associations without being dependent on them. Among other things, the film offers riveting, almost documentarylike sequences showing how such great houses once functioned, how dozens of guests were accommodated, how elaborate meals were prepared, how the servants preserved order among themselves through their own hierarchies.

Stevens, as wondrously played by Mr. Hopkins, is a very strange romantic hero. He's fussy, uptight, humorless and seemingly asexual. As improbable as it might seem, "The Remains of the Day" is a love story, possibly two love stories. It is most immediately about the edgy relationship of Stevens and Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson), the beautiful, lively and very efficient housekeeper whom he hires after the previous housekeeper runs off with the underbutler.

In spite of her beauty, Miss Kenton wins the sober-sided Stevens's support. She's obviously motivated by a strong need for work and would appear to be commonsensical. "I know from my own experience," she tells him early on, "how the staff is at sixes and sevens when they start marrying each other." In the months that follow, it's clear that Miss Kenton is drawn to the commanding, cool Stevens.

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Yet Stevens allows nothing to come between him and his duties, which is just another way of saying between him and Lord Darlington. There isn't anything either overtly or covertly sexual about their relationship. They are servant and master, but it's a relationship so satisfactory to both, each in a different way, that it subsumes the sexual and even the romantic.

Stevens worships Lord Darlington, a well-meaning twit of dangerously serious ambitions to serve England and save it from war as Hitler consolidates his hold on Germany. Darlington Hall becomes the center of all sorts of unofficial diplomatic conferences that, Stevens understands, will decide the fate of Europe. It is through Lord Darlington that Stevens, whether he's planning a banquet for 40 or passing port in the library, sees himself as serving history. When his master is accused of being a Nazi sympathizer of possibly treasonous proportions, Stevens's world also collapses.

This is not giving away the plot. Lord Darlington's awesome naivete is made known early in the film, which unfolds in a series of flashbacks from 1958, shortly after Lord Darlington's death and the sale of Darlington Hall. The hall's purchaser is Lewis (Christopher Reeve), a rich American who, as a United States Congressman, participated in one of Lord Darlington's peace-now conferences just before Munich.

The film begins when Stevens, having been given a week's holiday by Lewis, as well as the use of the old Daimler, sets off on a journey to the west of England. His goal: to see Miss Kenton, now Mrs. Benn, whom he believes is ready to come back to Darlington Hall since the failure of her 20-year marriage. As Stevens rolls majestically through the rolling countryside, his adventures prompt a shattering re-evaluation of his life.

Harold Pinter wrote an earlier screen adaptation of the novel, but it's difficult to imagine how anyone could improve on Ms. Jhabvala's screenplay and Mr. Ivory's direction of it. Though the collaborators are sometimes less indirect than Mr. Ishiguro, the film retains the sense of the novel and is as rich in texture and incident.

In Ms. Thompson's performance, which suggests Miss Kenton's desperate, aching sexuality, the film makes coherent a passion not really believable in the novel. Ms. Thompson is splendid, even to the way Miss Kenton's carefully acquired upper-class accent, which she uses while in service at Darlington Hall, slips a few notches when she's met 20 years later.

Mr. Fox and Mr. Reeve head the fine supporting cast, which also includes notable work by Peter Vaughan, as Stevens's fearful old father; Hugh Grant as Lord Darlington's godson, an aristocrat who becomes a caustic critic of the politics of appeasement, and Tim Pigott-Smith, who plays Miss Kenton's husband, a very good role that isn't even in the book.

In the way that "The Remains of the Day" looks grand without being overdressed, it is full of feeling without being sentimental. Here's a film for adults. It's also about time to recognize that Mr. Ivory is one of our finest directors, something that critics tend to overlook because most of his films have been literary adaptations. It's the film, not the source material, that counts. "The Remains of the Day" has its own, securely original cinematic life.

A version of this review appears in print on November 5, 1993, on Page C00001 of the National edition with the headline: Review/Film: Remains of the Day; Blind Dignity: A Butler's Story. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe